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Marcha LGBT in Bogotá 2013. Some rights reserved.

It all starts
with a love story in times of change. Of the many prisoners in the Colombian
prison La Picota, this story touches on
the life of Laura, a transgender woman, from the Santa Fe neighborhood in
Bogotá, a city area where transgender women find themselves confined in a
context of poverty and street-related practices for survival. Structural
violence and criminalization result in high levels of incarceration of
transgender women from Santa Fe. In La
Picota Laura met Jaime, a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP). In
prison, they came to love each other during the initial period of the peace
talks in 2012.

In La Picota, the relationship between Laura
and Jaime got the attention of other incarcerated FARC-EP members. Given that
the vast majority of FARC-EP militants come from rural, religious and socially
conservative backgrounds, they accused their comrade Jaime of being “a queer”.
His love affair undermined their conception of hetero-normative revolutionary masculinity
and they condemned him, labeled him a traitor and suggested that he should be
expelled from the ranks of the FARC-EP. After receiving much abuse, Jaime
requested the FARC-EP Secretariat’s intervention.

The political
climate during the inception of the peace negotiations created a context of
re-evaluation of the FARC-EP’s stance towards people of non-hegemonic genders
and sexualities, and the FARC-EP’s presence in the gender sub-commission of the
Peace Accords opened up a space of deep reflection. In addition, Jaime’s
high intellectual capacity was particularly valued and his dismissal would have
represented a heavy loss. Given the confluence of these factors, the FARC-EP did
not expel Jaime, as his comrades insisted on doing, even as he entered into a civil
union with Laura in La Picota. The
FARC-EP Secretariat circulated a written communication requiring its
incarcerated members to stop harassing their comrade Jaime.

Meanwhile, since
2012, the Trans Community
Network(RCT) from the Santa
Fe neighborhood maintained a regular presence in La Picota. Founded in 2012 by transgender women sex workers as a
popular, street-based and trans-feminist organization, the RCT’s mission is to
strengthen relationships between the transgender population in the streets, the
academy, social organizations, community projects and state initiatives,
advocating for and defending the lives of transgender people. As community
educators in Santa Fe of transgender women who provide sexual services, RCT members
share
knowledge on political advocacy, human rights, sexual and reproductive health,
security, and citizen participation. The RCT uses art and culture as its best
tools for the promotion of activism and advocacy because they provide a high
level of visibility and social impact.

Given the
criminalization of transgender women’s survival practices in Santa Fe, much of
the neighborhood’s population goes in and out of prison. This is why one of the
main RCT projects - Bodies in Prison, Minds in Action - takes place in La Picota, where the organization assists
incarcerated transgender women and gay and bisexual men defending their rights,
given the constant violence and abuse from both inmates and
guards.

Laura participated
in the project since the very beginning. Most men in the prison that have
sexual and affective relations with transgender women participating in this
project do not themselves participate in it for fear of harassment and
discrimination. Laura asked permission for Jaime to participate and he contributed
with assistance on understanding prison dynamics, and on how to
navigate through the infrastructures, procedures and protocols of the National
Prison Institute (INPEC). The RCT worked with many other transgender women’s rights
advocates to adapt prison protocol to the needs of LGBTI people, such as the right
to use their chosen name, permission to wear clothes and have access to products
and accessories expressing their gender, continuing hormone treatments, and providing
specialized medical attention. In collaboration with inmates - including FARC members,
prison employees, and a team of lawyers, psychologists, artists and others -
they created a guidebook of rights for incarcerated
transgender people.

These
relationships led to an invitation to participate with the FARC-EP. While several
initiatives from the State - including the peace accord gender sub-commission -
and civil society have addressed the role of LGBTI populations in the building
of peace, transgender people, including those participating in the RCT, felt themselves
excluded from them to a large extent. RCT participants criticized mainstream
LGBTI non-governmental organizations for holding high-level meetings and producing
reports but little or no real action. In this context, the invitation to work
with the FARC-EP, while completely unexpected and surrounded by a good deal of uncertainty,
proved to be an interesting option well worth exploring. Instead of asking for
a seat at the LGBTI table, they took this opportunity to break away from the
political dead-end they were in and to work on significant issues for their
cause in other spaces, and on setting up a political platform from which to
contribute to the peace building efforts.

Before the peace
agreement was signed in November 2017, a previous one had been submitted to a national
referendum in October of the same year and had been voted down by a slim margin.
Among the many civil society efforts to support the peace accord and to voice
outrage at the outcome of the referendum, the Juridical Solidarity group, which offers legal advice to interns in
prisons, invited the RCT to participate in the vigil for peace in the FARC pre-concentration
zones in preparation for the final demobilization process, under the auspices
of the United Nations. In this extremely delicate political moment, the FARC-EP
created a meeting space with the RCT. RCT members explain that they were
terrified at the prospect, but they went ahead and attended anyway. They define
the reception they were given as an open one. The FARC-EP wanted to learn, and acknowledged
its ignorance regarding questions of gender and sexuality. In contrast to the
rejection they experience in most social spaces, the FARC-EP never treated them
disrespectfully.

This exchange also represented
the opening of a learning process on the FARC-EP’s historical perspective and
the building of sustainable communities. In addition to more formal exchanges,
sharing spaces of celebration - including dance, jokes and play - quickly broke
down any existing barriers. Jaime also connected RCT members to the rural
temporary normalization zone Antonio Nariño, which they have visited five times
since February 2017 and where they have held workshops on cultural expression,
art, folkloric and Arabic dance.

RCT director
Daniela Maldonado Salamanca thinks that only five years ago, when the RCT was
founded, she would never have imagined establishing such an alliance with the
FARC-EP. But the two groups have in
common several experiences which bring them together: the clandestine lifestyle
and the heightened levels of incarceration - for sexual/gender reasons and for
reasons of political dissidence; and also the fact that the FARC-EP members
change their names in their construct of a revolutionary identity and transgender
people change names in relation to their gender transition.

The excitement, high
expectations and hope that the transition to peace promises crystallize around
this unlikely alliance. Only time will tell if it holds through to the process
of formalizing the FARC as a political party. Will this period be the origin of
new insurgent feminisms from the margins which include trans-feminism and
transforms political subjectivity and sexual citizenship in Colombia? Or will
it end up as another example of pink-washing – that is, in the FARC-EP’s use of
the transgender and feminist groups’ political agendas for legitimizing its transformation
into a political party? Considering the fact that the evangelical and socially
conservative political sectors represent a formidable enemy to both the FARC-EP
and the RCT, the alliance may very well hold through, and beyond, this
transitional period. In any case, while it carries some added vulnerability to
the already highly precarious lives of transgender activists, it also enables
the setting up of significant political platforms from which to demand
recognition and advocate for transgender rights and a dignified existence in
the construction of the “new” Colombia.

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